Did you get a £1m bonus this year?

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Have you seen the news today? Stephen Hester, chief of Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), has been awarded a bonus worth £1 million.

We’ve already had to bail out RBS to the tune of billions of pounds. Since then, it has failed to meet targets set by the government for lending to small businesses. And now we’re expected to cough up £1 million to reward the chief executive for good work.

Politicians have failed to stop RBS awarding this bonus to Stephen Hester. Today, lots of them are speaking out, asking him to refuse to accept the money. A Foreign Office minster, Jeremy Brown MP, said that Mr Hestor earned more in three days than a soldier fighting in Afghanistan earns in a year.

If we all add our names to a huge petition telling Stephen Hester to refuse his bonus, we can shame him into doing the right thing.

The gap between the have and have-nots in our society is getting bigger all the time. Many wealthy bankers, politicians and businessmen seem to live in a different world from the rest of us. In their world, it’s the done thing to make as much money as possible for yourself while watching others struggle to get by.

Government ministers have done nothing to stop this massive payout – so let’s tell Stephen Hester directly that tens of thousands of us are disgusted at his bonus and demand that he do the right thing.

We’ll deliver all the signatures to him at RBS offices. He might decide that the money means more to him than his sense of what’s right and wrong. Or he might bow to our pressure and refuse to accept the payout.

One way or the other, we can send this bank boss a clear message – tens of thousands of us believe that it is wrong for him to take this money.